Responses by Kim Knoll, designer/cofounder, Knoed

Background: This is our portfolio site and biggest marketing tool for attracting our ideal clients—new startups and small businesses who are looking for branding and collateral. It’s been five years since we did a site refresh and feels good to have a new face online!

Favorite details: Knowing users are busy and looking at multiple studios when deciding who to work with, with help from Static Interactive, we wanted to make our site extremely simple and efficient by distilling the content down to two valuable pages: Work and Info. While it looks simple, we actually have five different page types, a questionnaire, a hardy news section and some tricky JavaScript to make the endless scroll happen. We’re proud of how it represents us aesthetically and the way we think.

Navigational structure: When we designed our previous site five years ago, we put the full navigation under the hamburger icon menu on desktop and mobile. There weren’t a lot of people doing that yet, so we wanted to take a risk and it paid off. Now everyone is doing that, so we wanted to do something different on desktop and mobile. By creating a two-page navigation, it enabled us to simply list each word in a corner at the top of the screen on desktop and mobile. We liked how easy it was for users to navigate and that it requires one less tap.

Time constraints: Being a company of two, all our time is spent on our clients and it leaves little time to work on things for us. This site was in the conception phase two years ago and we would work on it a little bit at a time every four months. It wasn’t until January of this year that we plowed through and spent nearly every night and weekend on it for four weeks straight. It sounds like it was rough, but it was fun! It felt like the old college days when we’d spend long days and nights in the art studio.

Technical features: On desktop only, we added a seamless, endless scroll on both the Work and Info pages. We liked the idea of bringing users back to the beginning of the page without making them scroll up. On the info page, we like that when you get to the bottom of the page, the photo and contact info scroll into place again as if it were a footer, but it’s the start of the page again. We didn’t add the endless scroll on mobile because it’s a much longer scroll to begin with, and we didn’t want users to be confused or frustrated when they’re on the go.